zooms past faster than a commuter late for work. This can wreak havoc on the downhole systems, as well as on many other types of drilling equipment, destroying even supertough Inconel and 17-4 stainless. “You’ve got this sandy, silty liquid going by at 60 fps (18.3
m/s). It erodes parts pretty quickly,” said Paul Seaton, vice president of marketing at APS Technology Inc. (Wallingford, CT), a global designer and contract manufacturer of drilling optimization products. “It’s amazing to see how quickly these expensive, precision-machined steel components are eroded away by the fl ow of the drilling fl uid.”
This is just one of the many challenges faced by energy producers today. APS aims to help these well operators with a variety of intelligent tools, including steerable drill motors, vibration damp- ers, modeling and analy- sis tools, and logging sensors, in addition to its MWD systems. Seaton has been with the com- pany since 2005 and says he and the rest of the APS team are focused on ways to continuously improve its products. “Better fl ow paths, reducing pressure drops, eliminating erosion and turbulence—these are all a big deal for us,” he said. Previously, many of the continuous improvement efforts at APS were accomplished using a variety of additive-manu- facturing (AM) methods such as selective laser sintering (SLS) and fused deposition modeling (FDM). These processes pro- duce accurate models of most any design imaginable, and do so in nylon, ABS, and other engineering-grade polymers. There’s only one problem: these materials don’t survive long in the harsh environment in which APS products are used. “We’ve had lots of plastic parts made for us,” said Seaton. “And while it’s nice to get your hands on them, and see how they fi t together, they’re of little value for testing our equip- ment. They just don’t last.
“However, now we’ve developed the ability to make those components in stainless steel, Inconel, and other metals, which is a huge advantage to us, because we can 3D print actual parts and use them under real-world conditions.”
Taking Control
Seaton is talking about APS’s integration of Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) technology from EOS (Novi, MI). Se- nior mechanical engineer Chris Funke was APS’s new team member when the EOSINT M 280 system arrived, and was part of the team tasked with putting the technol- ogy to work.
“The system had only
The DMLS process employs a laser and precision optics to build fully-dense metal components, one layer at a time. Here an APS stator is being printed.
been here a month or so when I started working at APS,” he said. “EOS supported us with on-site training and application advice, and we were able to progress pretty quickly into prototyping different parts. Because of those early wins, we are now shifting into more produc- tion-oriented work.” One of those wins is a
fi ve-stage turbine used to power a steerable drilling
head and its onboard MWD system. Each turbine contains several parts printed using DMLS, which, in the case of the EOSINT M 280, uses a 200–400-W Yb-fi ber laser and preci- sion scanning optics to trace tissue-thin slices of a CAD model onto a bed of fi ne metal powder. As the laser passes, each individual metal particle melts and becomes fused to its neighbors, “growing” the part. Once each slice has been scanned and melted, a fresh layer of powder is spread over the burgeoning workpiece and the process is repeated, layer by layer, until complete.
Each turbine contains “some complicated end housings”
and fi ve sets of stators and rotors, all of which are built on APS’s EOSINT M 280. Funke said these components are defi nitely seeing real-world drilling action, including service in the company’s own test well, currently 3000' (914-m) deep.
49 — Energy Manufacturing 2016
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186